Javanese

Dodot (hip wrapper)

Batik is the Javanese term for a resist-patterning technique in which wax is drawn or stamped on cloth before bathing it in dye. Here, the very finely woven fabric allows for a complex and detailed design. Two areas were known for different batik styles, the Pasisir (north coast) region and central Java (particularly the Yogyakarta and Surakarta areas). The designs and colors associated with these styles reveal the wearer’s ethnicity, gender, age, marital status, and social rank. Free-flowing patterns featuring meandering vines and tendrils are categorized as semen designs and have long been a symbol of high status restricted to court use throughout central Java. The central Java courts all wore similar patterns, but their color palettes differed. This hip wrapper displays the best-known Surakarta court combination, blue, white, and light brown, on two batik panels seamed together.

The central textile in this case is a Javanese dodot, a royal ceremonial skirt cloth that is more than twice the size of a regular long cloth (kain panjang). All three textiles are patterned with semèn - a conspicuously male iconography with Hindu roots. Part of a group of batik motifs historically reserved for nobility and representing the cosmic realm, its name derives from the Javanese word semi, meaning to sprout. The pattern also includes temple buildings, plant tendrils, and animals, in particular the bird garuda, representative of heaven and earth, and the snake, or naga, symbolizing the mother of the underworld and the creatures of the sea.